Liam Lawson has said he\u2019s grateful for the relentless pressure put on him as a junior driver, as it\u2019s enabled him to handle the pressure of uncertainty.<\/p>\n
Lawson\u2019s seat for the F1 2026 season was only confirmed in the days before the season finale in Abu Dhabi, with the Kiwi driver facing an enormous amount of pressure over whether he would secure a seat for next year.<\/p>\n
Liam Lawson: I\u2019m thankful to have gone through the pressure in the past<\/p>\n
Lawson started the year with the senior Red Bull squad, having done enough towards the end of 2023 to convince then-senior management at Red Bull that he could handle stepping up alongside Max Verstappen.<\/p>\n
While this promotion ultimately didn\u2019t work out, with Lawson being moved back to Racing Bulls after just two races, the Kiwi recovered well at the sister team and began delivering upon his potential despite having had to readjust to life in a very different car to the one he had carried out pre-season preparations with.<\/p>\n
Towards the end of the year, the uncertainty about the Racing Bulls seats began to mount. With Lawson\u2019s teammate Isack Hadjar impressing to the point of appearing a shoo-in for a Red Bull promotion, Lawson was facing competition from the emerging Arvid Lindblad and a possible return for Yuki Tsunoda, meaning his seat was far from secure.<\/p>\n
However, Lawson did enough to convince Red Bull that he was the right option, with Tsunoda being the driver to lose out as the Japanese driver was shuffled back to reserve driver status.<\/p>\n
But, up until he was confirmed as continuing, Lawson faced intense public scrutiny as he faced media questioning about his future, with the 23-year-old shrugging off this potential distraction to deliver some strong results towards the end of the year.<\/p>\n
The Red Bull junior driver programme, whose primary talent-spotter was the now-resigned Helmut Marko, has been well-known for its ruthlessness and unrelenting demands on drivers to perform consistently and strongly.<\/p>\n
This happens at every level of the programme, as a means to check which drivers can cope with the pressure, even if it can look, from the outside, needlessly torturous for drivers in their formative teenage years.<\/p>\n
For Lawson, having come out the other side to successfully make it into F1 and now finally establishing himself in the midfield, he said that he\u2019s grateful for the approach taken by Marko and the programme.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe it\u2019s a bit more knowing that there\u2019s quite a lot of pressure in this team, I guess Red Bull is known for trying to put drivers under that extra bit of pressure to try and see how we deliver,\u201d he told media, including PlanetF1.com, at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, when asked if the uncertainty of not knowing his future had affected him.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut it\u2019s something that we\u2019ve honestly experienced for quite a long time.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor us and for me, being a junior when I was young, I\u2019ve now been six years with Red Bull, and my first year with them at 17 years old was already that. It wasn\u2019t obviously this level, but it felt like it at the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt felt like that kind of pressure when the conversations are, \u2018You need to perform, otherwise you don\u2019t have a future, \u2018 and stuff like that.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the kind of stuff that we were experiencing at a young age.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m thankful now to have gone through that, because, when we have these kinds of moments throughout the year, we\u2019re talking about being re-signed for next year, it sort of feels like that level of pressure that I\u2019ve actually dealt with before.\u201d<\/p>\n
More on Racing Bulls<\/p>\n
Racing Bulls makes major F1 2026 driver announcement<\/a><\/p>\n